The Pirate Bay is not down: Four domains suspended, redirect turned off (updated)

The Pirate Bay went down today, though not for everyone. Four of the site’s domains have been suspended, meaning once the DNS entry updates have propagated, they won’t work for you. Instead, you will get a generic error, such as “This webpage is not available” in Chrome and “Unable to connect” in Firefox.

All four domains have been set to “clientHold” — they have expired. It’s not clear what caused the expiry, but given the nature of the site, pressure from copyright laws may be to blame. Indeed, ICANN’s definition for the clientHold status code says as much:

This status code tells your domain’s registry to not activate your domain in the DNS and as a consequence, it will not resolve. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion.

Here are the WHOIS lookups for each of the four domains:

Users on The Pirate Bay’s forums, SuprBay, started to notice the issue with the domains earlier today. But again, not everyone is seeing the problem just yet. New torrents are apparently still being uploaded.

The Pirate Bay’s official blog has yet to post anything about the latest developments. But the blog hasn’t been updated since February, so the forum is the better candidate to provide more information.

As a result, many torrent users have switched away from The Pirate Bay, because “the world’s most popular file-sharing website” title is in question. But even major alternatives such as KickassTorrents have seen their own problems.

The Pirate Bay loves using an image of a hydra to imply that cutting off one head, in this case a domain, will only result in more heads taking its place. Right now, though, all six domains have been cut off.

It’s not clear how The Pirate Bay will resolve this latest issue. The site’s administrators could redirect users to yet another domain (for example, thepiratebay.org appears to be in working order).

We will monitor the situation at The Pirate Bay and update you as we learn more.

Update: It appears The Pirate Bay has turned off the redirect to the four domains. Users are thus simply taken to thepiratebay.se, which is still working, just like before, when all the new domains started being used.